The Hidden Land (16 page)

 

The whistle piped obediently its flourish, and in the pause between verse and verse Matthew said, “Randolph?”

Randolph, on the other side of the fire, lowered the instrument to his knee; the ring on his hand flashed, and then the silver curve of his circlet sparked in the firelight as he turned his head to look at Matthew.

Matthew sang,
“Fear no more the lightning-flash,”
but Laura only half-heard him. It was happening again. The first blue glint from Randolph’s ring blurred and widened, and in place of the red fire and the sharp-shadowed faces of her brother, her cousins, and her inventions, she saw Lord Andrew. He stood in a bare, round room through whose windows showed only the high and empty sky. He leaned his hands on a plain wooden table, staring at its surface, on which lay a scattering of splinters and colored glass. The splinters came from a vicious gash in the tabletop, as if somebody had hit it with an axe—or a sword. You could not tell from looking where the bits of glass came from, but Laura knew. This was how the room in the North Tower had looked, after Patrick broke the Crystal of Earth. Except that Andrew had not been there.

Randolph’s circlet gleamed again as he moved his head, and the vision was swallowed in firelight. Randolph was singing now, in a voice lighter than Matthew’s, and one that sounded somehow less trained, but was very clear.

“Fear not slander,”
sang Matthew,
“censure rash.”

“Thou hast finished joy and moan.”
Randolph’s voice faltered a very little; perhaps he had been out of breath from his playing. Laura looked at Ted again. He was staring at Randolph as if he expected him to begin doing cartwheels.

The next lines Matthew and Randolph sang together, as Laura’s mother and father did, as though they were used to it:

 

Laura wondered where Ruth was; Ruth, whose lover Randolph was supposed to be, except that Randolph had seemed to prefer Claudia.

Then Matthew,
“No exorcisor harm thee.”

And Randolph,
“Nor no witchcraft charm thee,”
and his voice cracked on the word “witchcraft” and barely recovered for the end of the line.

Matthew, his face anxious, went on,
“Ghost unlaid forbear thee,”
and Fence’s voice rose and mingled with his.

“For the love of heaven, Matthew, something cheerier.”

The stories he told had been funny ones, thought Laura. She did not understand what was happening. She looked from one to another of them. Matthew was obviously upset. Fence’s face was quite calm, and Randolph’s hidden in shadow as he bent his head to the recorder again.

“Patrick Spens,” said Matthew, quickly, and they began it.

Laura knew this one, and was pleased. It did unsettle her, a little, to hear a Scottish song in the Secret Country. She smiled at Ted, but he was still staring at Randolph.

 

The music of the recorder wavered, squawked, and fell silent. Matthew was silent also.

“I cry you mercy,” he said after a moment.

“No, I cry you,” said Randolph. His voice was steady. “My skill is someways rusty. Fence?”

“Not, I think, the whistle,” said Fence, cheerfully. He looked around. Laura saw that the boy who had brought her and Ellen had disappeared.

“Patrick?” said Fence. “Of your courtesy, will you go to my tent and bring me the lute you find there?”

“Gladly,” said Patrick; he sounded excited.

He got up and walked off. Randolph unscrewed the two pieces of the whistle and began to dry them carefully, as Laura’s mother would do with her recorder. Ted watched him as if he had never seen anybody do such a thing. Matthew and Fence, looking at one another, might have been holding a long conversation by telepathy, if there had been telepathy in the Secret Country. The fire popped and rustled. In the otherwise utter quiet that had overtaken them, Laura could hear laughter and singing at other fires, and a discreet chinking that puzzled her for a moment. Then she saw, dimly in the trees behind Fence, the two armed and mailed men who stood watch there, one facing the camp and the other the dark woods.

Laura’s sense of happy adventure was beginning to suffer. She was disturbed, as always, by any anxiety or discord among the grown-ups; and the guards had reminded her what she had managed to forget: that they were going to a battle, not to a picnic. She looked at Ellen, who was scowling at the fire.

Ellen looked back at her, and leaned over. Her sense of adventure seemed to be suffering, too. She looked worried.

“Maybe I was wrong,” she said in Laura’s ear. “Maybe he
is
sorry.”

Then Laura understood. No witchcraft charm three, and Randolph had killed the King with a magical poison. The King sat in Dumferling town, drinking of the blood-red wine. And Randolph had put the poison in the wine.

“What will they
think?
” she whispered back. The song’s the thing, she thought wildly, wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the counselor.

“Just that he misses the King and doesn’t want to be reminded of what happened,” said Ellen, serenely confident as always.

“Well, he’d better watch out.”

“They think he’s wonderful,” said Ellen, a tinge of the usual scorn returning to her voice. “They’ll never guess.”

Laura, whose other self, the Princess, had loved Randolph almost as much as she loved Fence; who would have loved him that much herself had not what she knew made her afraid of him, opened her mouth and closed it again. Even if arguing with Ellen would make Ellen change her mind, which was not often the case, she could not do it here. She said instead, “What’s the matter with Patrick?”

“He thinks the song proves something.”

“What?”

“It’s Shakespeare.”

“So what?”

“He thinks,” said Ellen, exasperation in her voice as she struggled to explain Patrick’s thoughts, which were never either simple or pleasing, in a whisper, “that it doesn’t mean anything if they
sound
like Shakespeare, or even if they say some
lines
from Shakespeare once in a while, but if they sing a whole
song
from Shakespeare, then we
did
make all this up.”

“He’s crazy,” said Laura, automatically. She had other things to worry about.

Patrick, looking no crazier than usual, came back with Fence’s lute, and after an amiable period of argument during which first Fence and then Matthew tried to tune it, and Randolph was finally obliged to take a hand, they settled into an uneventful evening of music. They gathered gradually a large audience and a number of helpful voices, trained and untrained. Agatha could sing, so could Conrad, so could all Matthew’s family, so could Andrew. Benjamin could not, but nobody seemed to care.

Laura, a disappointment to two musical parents, kept her mouth shut. Patrick’s argument was gaining force as the songs followed one another through the dark hours of the evening. She knew almost all of them. Her father had records full of them.
“There lived a wife in Usher’s Well/A wealthy wife was she.”
Her mother sang them around the house, baking bread or bathing the dog or painting the ceiling in the back hall that cracked every spring.
“A lady lived by the North Sea shore/Lay the bent to the bonny broom.”
Her parents sang them together in the evenings, when she and Ted were in bed.
“A holiday, a holiday, in the first month of the year/Lord Donald’s wife rode in to town, some holy words to hear.”
Her mother sang them to her when she had the mumps.
“ ’Twas in the merry month of May/When green buds all were swelling/Sweet William on his death-bed lay/ For love of Barbary Allen.”
She sang them to Ted when Ted broke his wrist.
“O what can ail thee, knight at arms,/Alone and palely loitering.”
Her father, who very seldom sang by himself, could occasionally be heard warbling one or two when engaged in some particularly vexatious duty, like fixing the fence where Laura had run into it with her bicycle. (The bicycle had been beyond fixing.)
“Young women they run like hares on the mountain.”

Laura sniffed hugely, and then swallowed hard. Ellen knew these songs, too; she was singing them, grinning, her anger at Patrick and her misjudgment of Randolph no longer troubling her.

Laura’s parents had not seen her for perhaps two weeks, if she understood what Ruth and Ellen had meant to do with Shan’s Ring, and if they had really done it. Actually, she had not seen her parents for three months. She had been furious when they parted from her, going callously off to Australia to visit Ruth and Ellen and Patrick and their parents, as they always did in the summer—but leaving Ted and Laura at the mercy of the cousins on the other side of the family, the wrong cousins, who watched television and played hide-and-go-seek.

 

In that fury and frustration, there had been no time to miss them. And then she had fallen over Shan’s sword, the scar of which she had still; and they had found the Secret Country, with Ruth and Ellen and Patrick waiting there already. Her parents were living in the same house as Ruth and Ellen and Patrick, but neither she nor Ted thought for a moment of asking after them. They had too much else to do.

 

“Oh, God,” said Laura, and burst into tears.

“Laurie?” said Ellen, who hated people who cried but had learned, after a fashion, to manage Laura when it happened.

“I want to go home!” said Laura, in a wet and strangled whisper.

“Fence, for shame!” said the vigorous voice of Agatha, that only a moment before had been singing better than Laura’s mother. “You’ve kept these children hours beyond their bedtime, and look at your reward.”

She picked Laura up off the ground and stood there holding her by the shoulders. Laura was so horrified that she stopped crying. You didn’t show a whole crowd of people that somebody was making a fool of himself. Agatha had, as her father once said about the high-school boy who drove the ice-cream truck past the farm every summer evening, the sensitivity of a deaf cow.

“And these soldiers also,” said Fence, tolerantly; and everybody laughed and began to go away.

“Let go of her!” said Ellen furiously to Agatha. “She isn’t a baby!”

“Let her not so behave, then,” said Agatha, smartly; but she did let go of Laura. “And mind your tongue,” she added to Ellen.

Ellen, perhaps mindful of the slap she had received the day of the funeral, said meekly, “Yes, mistress.”

“Come your ways, then,” said Agatha, and walked off in the direction of their own fire and tent and bedrolls. Laura managed a weak giggle.

“What’s the
matter
with you?” demanded Ellen.

“I want to go home,” said Laura, drearily.

“Cheer up,” said Patrick behind them. “You
are
home. Didn’t you hear those songs? Right out of our heads, every one of them. Or do you think somewhere in the Secret Country people talk in Scottish accents?”

“Patrick,” said Ellen, “shut up. You promised Ruth.”

“But there’s new
evidence.
”

“I don’t care.”

“You’d make a terrible scientist,” said Patrick, in his most scathing tones.

“Thank you,” said Ellen, and did him a courtesy.

“You
deserve
this!” said Patrick. “You deserve to be stuck in a crazy hallucination. But why me?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellen, in a tone Laura had very seldom heard her employ. “
I
could certainly do without
you.
”

And taking Laura by the arm as if they were about to begin a dance, she walked her away from the fire.

 

The next day they came down out of the wooded hills, and began walking, with no great fervor, across the grassy miles and miles and miles before the mountains of the Secret Country’s southern border. Every once in a while the land would fold itself around a stream or spring, and there would be a few trees. But the army used these only for camping, not to walk through the shade of them. The sky was like a bowl of glass Laura had seen just before High Castle’s glassblower cooled it, and all around them grasshoppers creaked and bounced.

Something in the weather or the landscape seemed to be having a depressing effect on everyone. Last night, everybody except Laura and Randolph had seemed to be having a good time. But this morning, said Patrick, who came back from wherever he was supposed to be and walked with Laura and Ellen, you would have thought everyone had been drinking too much.

He said Fence and Randolph were grumpy and had infected Ted. It was getting hot by this time, and Laura decided that Fence and Randolph must have infected Patrick, who was infecting her and Ellen. They had a few sharp exchanges, and soon became too disgusted even for that. They marched along in a glum silence. It got hotter and dustier, but somehow no nearer lunchtime.

“What’s wrong with everybody?” said Laura to Ellen. “I thought in the old days when war was a good thing everybody used to go to it singing.”

“I dunno,” said Ellen.